Media Release: NZCCL opposes social media ban for the under 16s

The New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties opposes the National Party’s bill to ban social media sites for people under the age of 16.

“The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act guarantees us the right to freedom of expression, the ability to seek, send and receive information, and this applies to people under the age of 16 too. They have the right to communicate with each other, their friends, and their family, and the modern reality is that they use social media to do so.” says Chairperson Thomas Beagle.

“But they’re doing more than that: we’ve seen youth-led political movements such as JustSpeak, School Strike 4 Climate and the Make It 16 campaigns all use social media to organise political campaigns. This bill is an attack on our right to freedom of association and discourages just the sort of politically active young people that our country needs.”

Included in the ban would be services such as Tiktok, Snapchat, YouTube, X, Facebook and Instagram. We note that members of parliament, political parties, government departments, local councils, schools, and a host of other organisations currently use all of these platforms to communicate with New Zealanders, including those under the age of 16.

“For better or worse, Facebook is where the bulk of New Zealand organisations communicate and we shouldn’t be blocking those under 16 from interacting with their local council, seeing what their school is posting, or joining their local drama group or sports team.”

But our objections are not only on principle, there are real practical issues too. Implementing an age limit obviously requires that all users, young and old, will have to prove their age and identity when getting online. We are concerned that this might lead to New Zealanders being forced to provide identity documents and other evidence to both local and foreign platform providers who already know far too much about us and are happy to sell that information to others.

“The similar ban has already failed in Australia with only a slight drop-off in usage observed. We fear that the inevitable failure in New Zealand will lead to ever stronger measures that further limit the freedom of all New Zealanders to access information and communicate without the state breathing down their neck.”

We acknowledge that social media can cause harm as well as provide benefits. The recent report from the Education and Workforce Committee made twelve recommendations of which a ban was only one. Maybe the other eleven recommendations should be investigated before doing anything as drastic as implementing a ban. 

The New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties opposes this bill as being unreasonable in principle and unworkable in practice.